Happy spring to everyone. The gardens and greenhouses are coming alive here at Camp Rawnora. I’m really enjoying the wild foraging, looking forward to finding some morel mushrooms. The retreat season is underway here at the camp. Here are a few of our upcoming events:

The recipe is pretty simple. Dulse, which is a sea vegetable, gives it the “tuna” taste. Other sea vegetables can be substituted. Sea veggies are a great source of trace minerals including iodine which is important for thyroid function.

Tu-No Salad

2 C sunflower seeds – soaked

1 – 2 T miso (organic, unpasteurized)

2 T apple cider vinegar

2 T lemon juice

1/4 – 1/2 C olive oil

1/2 C onion – diced

1/4 C dulse flakes

1 C celery – diced

2 T capers – add at end

1 – 2 t paprika

1/2 t salt or to taste

Place all ingredients except the capers, onions and celery into the food processor and process smooth.

Transfer the mixture to a bowl and fold in the onions, celery and capers.

Time flies when you’re buried in snow. It seems like only a few weeks ago I was down in Florida enjoying the ocean and the sun. Months have passed but the memories remain. I took a road trip with my former girl friend and now good friend Stacia down to Bradenton, Florida in mid December. We spent Christmas with her cousin Tess Challis and family. Tess is a vegan chef and author who is also the co-founder of Get Waisted, a healthy vegan version of weight watchers. Tess’ husband Carl is the head chef at a raw food cafe in Sarasota called Ionie. I spent a day in the kitchen Tess and Carl… tasty good times.

Now I’m back in Michigan at Camp Rawnora. There’s no shortage of snow in these parts. I’m looking forward to the start of the 2014 season here at the camp. We still have 2014 Raw Recipe calendars available. It’s never too late to pick one up.

Our first event this year is the March Maple Water Fast beginning on Wednesday March 19th through Sunday March 23rd.

Thanks for joining me for the second installment of the “pawpaw diaries”. This weeks episodes features a video and recipe for pawpaw pie. Considering that pawpaw is the largest indigenous North American fruit, I think I’m justified in saying that pawpaw pie is more American than apple pie. Apples immigrated to North America with the European colonists while pawpaw was here long before they arrived.

Natural growing range of pawpaw

One interesting thing about the pawpaw tree is its flowers, which are tri-lobed and face the ground when in bloom. These funny flowers aren’t very fragrant and what little fragrance they have isn’t very friendly. Their smell has been likened to rotting meat which explains their native pollinators: blow flies, carrion beetles and the occasional fruit fly. I put my nose up to a flower in the Spring and really didn’t notice a smell at all. Pollinated flowers yield fruit that ripens by late September and early October here in Southwest Michigan. Ripe fruit drops from the trees and is a highly prized meal for deer, squirrels, fox, raccoons, possum and black bears. It’s rare to find an unblemished fruit on the ground. Usually they’ve been snacked on. The best harvesting technique I’ve found is to shake the tree and collect what hits the ground. You can admire my technique in the video included in my previous post on pawpaw.

Pawpaw Flower

The more I learn about pawpaw the more impressed I am with it. Why has no one ever heard of this fruit? Why can’t you get it in grocery stores?

Pawpaw at Whole Foods

Unfortunately pawpaw hasn’t quite made it mainstream… yet. While there are plenty of pawpaws feeding the woodlands creatures, they’ve only established themselves at local farmer’s markets and at regional grocery stores. Some of the disadvantages pawpaw’s have which are preventing them from being more mainstream is that they quickly ripen once picked, bruise easily and potentially ferment in their skin once ripe. Some varieties of pawpaw have shown to be better cultivars than others. The ideal pawpaw variety yields many fruit of large size with abundant flesh and few seeds. If Neal Peterson has his way, pawpaw would be seasonal staple around the country.

Neal Peterson tasted his first pawpaw in 1975 and since then he has made it his mission in life to develop pawpaws into viable cultivated crop. Over the past 30+ years he has created pawpaw varieties with outstanding yield, size, flavor and percentage of flesh. For those wishing to look into growing your own pawpaw, he is the authority and source for all things pawpaw.